With the latest update released today, all RealBird single property websites got a new social bookmarking component. We switched from our own social bookmark links to using ShareThis - the leading social bookmarking add-on for blogs. With ShareThis, the bookmarking links on the listing websites are always up-to-date, more extensive in selection and the user interface is more attractive. The rotating icon is also a good eye-catcher and invites visitors to check out and use the feature. ShareThis also records statistics of usage and hopefully via their API we will be able to report it back to you. This is to be developed, but it will be interesting information to provide.

ShareThis also allows you to post your listing on your social network profiles including Facebook and MySpace. The actual end result depends on the platform, but I suggest to take the extra few minutes per listing to share it through this new tool on as many places as you can.

Feedpot.com tracks real estate blog posts across the Internet and shows them on a ticker style interface as they appear. I developed this as a pet project a year ago - mostly for myself, to see what's happening in the real estate blogsphere. I recently updated the source with new feeds, so here is an intro, hopefully you will find it useful. Feedpot.com is an almost real-time view of the real estate web; or at least the subset which is included in the Feedpot.com. I usually have Feedpot.com running in the background in a separate browser window during the day, which gives me an easy way to get a sneak preview into things what may be breaking RE news. Of course, through widgets, one can track the real estate web on desktops like the Mac OSX Dashboard (see below) or add it and share it with blog readers as well.

The main aggregator feeds in the Pot are:

ActiveRain latest posts feed - aggregated feeds of the recent AR posts from all members

RealTown aggregated feed

3 Inman News feed

RealBird feed - the aggregated feed of the latest listings published through RealBird

RELiberation aggregated feed - similar to ActiveRain's feed, it tracks all RELiberation members latest posts

Trulia Voices - latest consumer/agent discussions on Trulia

Zolve - the aggregate feed of the their members' blogs

And the new addition: FriendFeed global aggregated postsand social network chatter filtered with the keyword "real estate". This includes diggs, social shares, Twitter one liners etc.

Or you can grab the widget below (allow a few seconds for the first article to be pulled)

For Mac users (Leopard) there is an easy way to get the FeedPot as a RE blog ticker and place it on your Dashboard (this technique works for other, automatically refreshing sites as well) Using Safari, visit www.FeedPot.com, then use the 4th, scissor icon in the toolbar, highlight the area on FeedPot you'd like to place on your Dashboard (the ticker), and click "Add". That's it. You can now track the real estate web on your Mac Dashboard.

ActiveRain - one of the leading and certainly the most dynamic real estate social networks - has 91,690 members, as of the time of writing this post. ActiveRain is free service and the value is unprecedented in terms of access to the vast amount of information shared by other real estate professionals and online marketing in general.

We call on all of you, real estate professionals (agents, brokers, appraisals, stager, mortgage lenders etc.) to join for free and let's help them together to reach the 100,000 members count.

ActiveRainis a blogging system in the sense that itenables you to write articles, it lists them in chronological order,syndicates it via RSS and feeds the search engine monster for maximumexposure and clearly identifies you as the author and authority.

ActiveRainis a training ground:Many of us come to ActiveRain for advice, discussions and to learn fromeach other. Training each other on business, marketing etc. is whatcreates the loyalty and incremental benefit, and this sets ActiveRainapart from other services.

ActiveRainis an ecosystem and a team marketing platform:One participant's success depends on the success of the overallecosystem and AR members directly and indirectly enhance each othersmarketing efforts. For example, there is such a deep interconnectionbetween the 1 million+ AR pages Google knows about, that search enginespay extra attention to content published via ActiveRain and value thecontent as highly relevant.

ActiveRain is a unique social network:Valuable social networks are those, where the connections between theparticipants create a value-add, which would not exist without theseconnections. That is, there are 1) new and 2) valuable information bornfrom these relationships. In other words, the relationships betweenActiveRainers are as important as the content generated by individuals.

To celebrate ActiveRain's contribution to the real estate industry, we - at RealBird - have released an ActiveRain Social Network Widget, which can be used to merge your ActiveRain and RealBird account into a handy, great looking, team marketing platform. Market your ActiveRain associates (the ActiveRain members you selected as your inner circle), each other's business profile, each other's listings (published through RealBird) and each other blog posts!

Below is an example of the widget with viral marketing capability built into it:

The widget above shows our own RealBird ActiveRain associates, their RealBird listings and the blog posts. To get your own, join ActiveRain and RealBird (both for free) and get your own widget from the RealBird member area.

Enjoy the benefits and let's give ActiveRain a helping hand to reach the 100,000 member mark.